There's more than a little Tarkovskian revery in this excerpt from the great Jonas Mekas' Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania—a film about his return to the village of his birth. In 2006, the film was selected to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, for its "cultural, aesthetic, or historical significance".

Mekas was a maestro of hand-held, super8 footage, which he used to bridge the gap between the traditional machinery of cinema—a fixed camera, a prepared script—and the personalities, loves, and lives that he captured on screen. That extremely mobile lens, which in many ways became his hallmark, lends films such as this a great intimacy and daring. A home movie edited and elevated into the realm of lyrical odyssey. In this 1972 documentation of his return to Lithuania—accompanied by his brother, being the first time he'd stepped on the nation's soil in twenty-seven years—Mekas weaved back and forth between New York and rural life in the eastern European country, in the village of Semeniskiai where he was born. 

It's a joyful film, but that joy conceals the vibrant anger and daring that fuelled Mekas' work and life. In an interview given many years later, he explained that this Lithuanian village was a paradise "where nothing happened then suddenly everything happened." The spreading sweep of the Soviet Union pushed him away, into the turbulent arms of hedonistic New York. His return, in 1972, was then a necessary albeit painful step. Its scenes are loving but also, for also poignant for knowing that Mekas was terribly separated from this world. The paradise was a paradise that could, for him, not perpetually exist.